>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
>Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.
I talked with Veeky Forums about this. There can't be no natural selection. Eventually it catches up. If we humans were to degenerate, selection would act upon it. Think of species with no natural predators on islands, eventually they self-select due to shortening food.
Is Land into eugenics? Then he is a big retard. Eugenics is theory, selection is empirical and works.
Aiden Wood
Nick Land is one of my favourite contemporary thinkers, not because I agree with him or his ideas but because he truly has a unique mind and reading him, especially the pre-amphetamine breakdown stuff, really is a trip.
I think he's kind of accidentally ended up in this group because he is public enemy number 1 in certain academic circles in the UK, and because he wants to piss off those people even further. He's on a totally different level intellectually to the rest of the NRx people but they're useful allies in his crusade to rile up leftist academia. He's like Voldemort to them or something, it's pretty funny.
An except from his older work that he wrote before he went insane:
>What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'—or situation relative to its object—becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis.
Jackson Murphy
I'm not sure how that quote implies no natural selection. It merely shifts the focus from "positive" adaptation where we look at whichever mutations remain after a time interval, to the outlook of degeneration allowing for more mutation to take place (not causing it), which is kinda the point of natural selection to begin with. That quote on the OP is aesthetic at best but it's basically your first paragraph embellished with E D G E.
Ryder Campbell
He ignores mutualism, sexual selection, group selection, heaps of modern biology so that his point of 'relentless, brutal culling' works out. This man is not informed.
Gavin Scott
>He's like Voldemort to them or something, it's pretty funny. Damn, that's exactly that, you can't even say his name without getting called a crypto fascist. He's basically corrupting the youths for them.
Ryder Powell
/thread
He really sounds like an edgy teen who has read Might Is Right by Redbeard and thinks he knows how evolution works.
Camden Cruz
all of this still falls under relentless culling user it's highly embellished like everything Land writes but the crux of it is just genetic survivability
Bentley White
No it doesn't, I even forgot all the random selection and neutral theory, showing that allele changes are much more random than 'genetic survivability' - it's old as balls, everybody cites Ohno 1970 for that one. Land has no clue.
Angel Hughes
here. I still fail to see how selection is not related to his points on that quote (no sarcasm either). If anything the quote is vapid because it repeats itself over and over about the very thing you claim it doesn't say.
James Sanders
alright, so how do the allele changes invalidate the fact that some are more optimal than others and flawed specimen are wiped out?
Jacob Edwards
Not him, but "flawed specimens" aren't wiped out, especially not among humans.
Poor, stupid, ugly and ignorant people literally breed all the time like rabbits.
In fact, the smarter you are, and the more physically attractive you are, the less likely you are breeding, which actually completely annihilates Land's thesis.
Josiah Fisher
>public ebemy number one Literally unknown
Asher Ramirez
he addresses this though >crucially, any attempt to escape this facility - or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it - leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. this outright states that humans merely suspend selection and henceforth degenerate I don't really see any contradiction here, and in any case in terms of pure genetic survivability "flawed specimen" has nothing to do with human preference for intelligence and attraction
Asher Jenkins
>this outright states that humans merely suspend selection and henceforth degenerate
Which is wrong. Humans don't "suspend selection". Evolution is literally occurring right this second judged by who breeds and who does not.
The fact that poor, stupid and ugly people breed and intelligent and attractive people don't, means that being poor, stupid and ugly is actually an evolutionary advantage.
Evan Gutierrez
It is annoying how the left is biophobic, and the right turns it into "red in tooth and claw", "survival of the strongest" hyperbole. I guess the humanities and biology will always be used for ideology.
Jack Young
What I mean is that what Land might consider genetically degenerate is only enabled through our social or mechanical systems, which are the method of suspension what happens when the suspenders come off? Either way, the unfit die off. In the pure unceasing evolution you speak of, the intelligent and attractive are the degenerate
Jaxson Brown
>is only enabled through our social or mechanical systems, Which really, is our natural environment as of now.
Xavier Mitchell
Point is, he is not the arbiter of what is "genetically degenerate". He cannot possible have that knowledge.
Evolution isn't teleological, simply because it ended up with human beings that have higher order intelligence. No one has any clue what kind of creature humans will evolve into in 5 million years, but one thing is for sure, that creature will be even more adapted to survival on this planet.
Lucas Hall
To anthropomorphize, I think evolution is very open-minded. It doesn't care whatever something we humans see as pathological, a freak, a mutant, or degenerate, or strong, good, bad etc. It is pragmatic. Whatever works in the environment works.
I like how Taleb talks of non-sucker vs sucker instead of truth or false. That's how evolution works, it doesn't care about good or bad, truth or false, just whatever works. That also makes it very inhumane in a sense.
Robert Hernandez
>means that being poor, stupid and ugly is actually an evolutionary advantage God it sure doesn't feel that way
Zachary Gutierrez
God. I wish all this got put into a book. My shelf calls for more Land.
Jose Smith
kek some people have difficult with le reality
Evan Harris
Nature don't care about your feels candy ass
Cooper Scott
Don't I know it
Levi Hughes
If the snail could think, would it think its slowness is evolutionary useful? Perhaps not the best of examples, perhaps fast snails would indeed be advantageous. It seems more likely the slow movement is a byproduct. I can't think of a better example. >That quote on the OP is aesthetic at best but it's basically your first paragraph embellished with E D G E. Is E D G E a necessary ingredient to win followers? I picture that it attracts a certain kind of followers, the desperate and hungry.
Adrian Butler
Land is projecting his own feelings of unworthiness and his own insecurities concerning the future onto an abstract problem called "the problem of humanity and the future of the world".
Liam Hernandez
>mutualism isn’t what you think it is sweetheart >sexual selection is often deleterious to fitness you fucking retard >group selection evidence or stop shouting nonsense at me >heaps >heaps of modern biology like what pumpkin? journal articles only or again keep your fucking mouth shut >da brutal relentless meat grinder don’t real ah yes i remember all the times the slow cheetahs got to eat >dis man don’t know bout merciful nature n welfare and how beautiful homosexuals and blaqs are oh ok
James Rogers
When is neo china arriving from the future anyway? I need my vat grow gf (male) already
After reading the whole thread I can't identify how his views contain any (at all) bias towards being anti-selection or selection. It's (the quote) just a very edgy and rather cute way of saying precisely what people are claiming he isn't saying (i.e that selection of any kind does not care about what we think about selection, it is empirical and fully unaligned with our moral compass). He says the scenario is hell to humans, some of you are saying it isn't hell, it just is, but both are coming to the same (and very basic/undeveloped) conclusions. In sum, he is not trying to have any stakes at all on what is genetically degenerate.
Furthermore it is also a common misconception on evolution to assume the kind of creature humans evolve to in 5 million years will be necessarily more adapted to survival on this planet as per . The random nature of things might actually lead selection to a dead end (which Land also reckons, happens more often than not). Our theory must allow for things such as humans going extinct through some selection mechanism rather than adapting, while roaches or something take over. It also has to allow for an upper limit for the adaptation threshold because we can be pretty fucking sure the will be no life on Earth after the Sun engulfs it. Furthermore selection is not a strictly maximizing functions and humans might be worse off in their capacity for adaptation as a tradeoff for a certain specialization (like in H.G.Wells' Time Machine with underground humans developing to limited but specialized creatures fit for underground living).
Evan Bailey
I hope you mean that in metaphorical sense because that's how I used it. I am attracted to the edgy so what I said applies to me. I'm just not sure if it is a good path to follow, that of the eternally hungry caterpillar.
Ayden Walker
Don't you think everyone does that? I imagine the Steven Pinker's and Matt Ridley's to project their own success and optimistic personality into their future. I think it was the Maori who see the future as behind us and the past in front of us. To go from there, maybe the future as we see it, is our personality, our current knowledge and experience. There's research suggesting that people filter information differently due to their biology (physiology, personality) and that this results into the different political leanings (together with social learning of course).
The alt-right has largely infiltrated and eaten the neoreactionaries.
Charles Miller
>The alt-right has largely infiltrated and eaten the neoreactionaries.
Not really possible because the neoreactionaries are against changing things "exit over voice" and some are actively pushing for acceleration of the fall of the West. Also, they aren't antisemites, for them the Jews assimilated into modernity, the modernity wasn't a product of the Jews. ("Why I am not an anti-Semite", Curtis Yarvin, June 23, 2007)
The alt-right is a blue-collar movement of populist right-wing nationalism for edgy teenagers and white trash republicans, the neoreactionary movement is almost nihilistic post-ideological theorization for philosophy professors (Land) and Ivy League graduates (Yarvin).
Daniel Gonzalez
This man is a living meme
Lucas Miller
An insider told me. And this is what I've noticed, but I could be wrong. I am aware that there are differences between the two. I know that /pol/ doesn't like the dark enlightenment. When I say eaten I mean appropriated and morphed into something else.
Jason Fisher
Also, you can't infiltrated an online community of highly educated people that only care about ideas and don't give a fuck about reality.
Nathaniel Williams
can't infiltrate*
Liam Rodriguez
I guess that's true. But I do mean their ideas are being appropriated and morphed beyond what they thought it was.
Luis Jones
Feel free to make errors, I don't care about them that much and make numerous. As long as we can communicate, I'm fine. Without error, without mutation, nothing evolves.
Isaac Wood
no it hasn’t, the alt-right’s collective iq is too low to subvert them
Ayden Cook
The cessation of an organism needn't be the cessation of the consciousness of that organism. On a long enough timespan human beings will die or cease to exist, but that doesn't mean that what follows after won't have origins in human consciousness.
Caleb Clark
Our guy. I hope he gets better.
Robert Cox
>and the right turns it into "red in tooth and claw", "survival of the strongest" hyperbole These people you are describing make up like 1% of the population at most.
Lucas Anderson
ligotti has nothing on nicky
Brandon Anderson
maybe to grindboy escalator dwellers like you. among the people in the know land is despised and feared.
Kayden Harris
>These people you are describing make up like 1% of the population at most. I think you are absolutely correct. I'm describing a hyperbole myself. But it reflects my experience. I've been on a message board with young men interested in animals when I was younger myself, and it is all about animal fights. And there are other online communities who act like this, but they might not reflect reality. All are young men by the way.
If you have regular folks they think of nature in Christian and Greek terms and stuff like the fallacy of balance of nature stuff. Everything has a purpose and place and so on.
Gavin Reyes
>All are young men by the way. or joe rogan
Eli Jackson
I don't think NRx thinkers care too much about this. If anything, they will have more leverage to keep spouting their thoughts and also get more money to stay inside their think tanks if the alt-right "takes over" or at least diminishes the pervasive influence of Left leaning policies in academia and other intellectual circles.
Julian Gray
What book should I start with if I want to get a better overview of his ideas?
Joshua Gomez
Fanged Noumena is the main gist. Some user has a Nick Land collected essays with additional stuff lying around though I don't have a link. Other than that he is mostly found shitposting on Jacobite and his blog at xenosystems.net/
Brayden King
Is there a part where he justifies this?
Brandon Bell
you're a retard and sci is full of people that are not very good at sci, hence the threads asking for help on assignments
selection can be stopped. not permanently, but long enough to made lineages nonviable
anyone that told you selection NEVER stops is retarded. the process is ergodic and entropic. meaning all configurations appear, and energy injected into the system delays inevitable configurations in proportion to the energy introduced
Robert Howard
evolution isnt teleological but intelligence is you idiot
if you have a bigger brain and more efficient genes, you have a higher g. period. intelligence selection acts upon then to increase these factors over time.
if you reduce the factor, intelligence reverses
Landon Miller
>He ignores mutualism, sexual selection, group selection
Utter piffle. Taking the long view, such things are mere trivia, dust under the fingernails of the much greater, omnivorous reality that is accelerationism.
Angel Reyes
You're just having a definitional problems.
This simply means that smart pretty people are failures, not that natural selection isn't true. You need to readjust your definition of flawed.
Eli Lopez
I'm actually relatively well-read on evolution. Veeky Forums might have some graduate students who study evolutionary biology, and who are a step above me. The experts are not within my reach.
I'm largely self-learned so that comes with major flaws, but what is your background? And I hope you can provide some papers.
Nicholas Gutierrez
lol
Jacob Kelly
literally just google "relaxed selection"
the proportion of energy in a system in an unlikely configuration increases by a factor of the unlikeliness of hte configuration and the amount of energy needed to maintain it
you arent half as educated as you think you are. typical failure of pride.
or dunning kruger
the only person that thinks evolution is some sort of immutable function of hilbert space is a retard that prays at an altar to black science man and subscribed to "I fucking LOVE science" feeds
James Allen
Land's point has nothing to do with science. He's just couched it in sci-fi language because that's his jargon. It's actually a classically liberal view, that any progress emerges out of incredible strife. See Hobbes and Machiavelli. It might also have precursors in the ancients (the historians, not the philosophers.)
John Jenkins
This. Stop conflating Land's embellished language with scientific inquiry. He's a philosopher first and foremost, he knows it, and he does not try to claim otherwise.
Jonathan Collins
Call me an idiot all you can. But let's keep on discussing. Google Scholar shows this: >Rapid decline of fitness in panmictic populations of Drosophila melanogaster maintained under relaxed naturalselection >Relaxed selection is a precursor to the evolution of phenotypic plasticity >The rapid evolution of signal peptides is mainly caused by relaxed selection on non-synonymous and synonymous sites Since I'm a retard, why don't you explain how that means no selection at all.
James Hill
reduced selection is a vector of the absence of the given process (being negentropy,) directly rpoportional to the absence of selection
if you had been born more intelligent than a nigger, you might have figured out that selection, like any physical property, is a VECTOR and not an immutable boolean dogma
selection is ergodic (look it up you stupid coon) and can and does disappear. you cant relable the lack of a thermodynamic process as a "totally the thermodynamic process that I fail to observe, in fact, it's so anti thermodynamic I'll call it athermodynamism and it still counts as the initial antecedent hurr durrrr"
you're rying to label coldness as a kind of "special heat." no. cold, is in fact, the absence of heat
no. thats not fucking ho it functions you nigger
Austin Williams
I wouldn't even consider him a philosopher. In a similar vein to how Nietzsche is sometimes not seen as a philosopher. Doesn't mean we cannot discuss evolution, doesn't mean anything bad to be no philosopher or scientist.
I think the most idiotic of idiocy has to be the rationalists. They know that cognitive biases exist, but yet they seem to believe they can overcome it. As if that isn't dunning-kruger. To understand certain scientific fields requires long and hard training, and it is specialized as fuck.
So really, we are still in the age of witchcraft and ghosts, and will likely be there forever. Nobody could learn everything that is necessary to have a full rationalist view of the world. And its mind, with cognitive biases and other quirks, will still corrupt it.
That is why the non-sucker/sucker dichotomy is more useful as the false/truth dichotomy.
Matthew Butler
You seem to have a physics background and you are not capable of speaking in other terms, or without getting pissed off all the time, so stop bothering. And I'll be honest, physics is out of my league. And you don't even engage with any papers so it is useless what you say.
Carter Sanchez
I am here to inform you that you are neither "read" nor sufficiently intelligent to understand evolutionary dynamics
reading "the seflish gene" doesnt make you smart
I've almost certainly read more humanities than you too
be more humble and people arent going to insult you as much
Ayden Watson
fyi I didn't post a paper bc you cant understand it
literally, the google scholar bit you posted refutes YOUR position. you just didn't understand
this is the reason everyone hates humanities majors
Jacob Watson
Diffferent person here. How is evolutionary selection ergodic? You draw very strong parallels to thermodynamics but I'm not quite sure how they fit. Mind elaborating?
William Hall
Enjoyable posts. Interesting even though I don't have the background to fully engage. The guy is probably a /pol/tard dilletante though, humanities majors can be annoying in their own way I think your comment is a misattribution. Do not use this as fuel for your STEMlord ego...
Josiah Smith
really pains me he's been lumped in with this kek and trump shit
William Wright
He doesn't think he's smarter than Moldbug
Liam Morales
I am not that guy but the idea is that, given enough time and/or enough sampling (or "tries" in the sense of more individuals being born), the process of selection is going to go through all of phase space. In short and only partially accurate words, selection will have picked up every single possibility of different directions it could take. This has all kinds of interesting consequences such as averages of measures taken in time being about the same as averages taken in the other variables (picking a large amount of random cases would be equal to watching one case develop for a long time interval).
Another interesting consequence and the one relevant here, is that ergodicity leads one to conclude that the probability of a certain direction being taken [inside the set of every direction that is possible] is never zero, hence evolutionary selection WILL stop at times if it CAN stop, just given enough time and/or "moves" of the process.
Nolan Jenkins
>He doesn't think he's smarter than Moldbug Certainly writes better than him, though
Aaron Morgan
Unqualified Reservations (especially the 'Open Letter') is an incredibly comfy read desu. Meandering armchair history with occasional hilarious and edgy jokes.
Jeremiah Russell
Nature is not "destructive" really, it's just completely nihilistic. Any time you assign some kind of consistent value or use to anything at all you misunderstand nature. Let's say, I am a naive christian I work hard on making the world a better place and get a nice wife whom I raise lovely children who share my enthusiasm for life and our merciful lord ignorant of the primordial meatgrinder I live in, bang! I am already a superior lifeform as far as nature is concerned to some edgy faggot either not raising children at all or creating heaps of misbegotten spawn with whores since nature doesn't even value what you call truth.
John Ross
name them
Aaron Adams
>Any time you assign some kind of consistent value or use to anything at all you misunderstand nature.
>I am already a superior lifeform as far as nature is concerned to some edgy faggot either not raising children at all or creating heaps of misbegotten spawn with whores since nature doesn't even value what you call truth.
"destruction" is not a word that has any meaning at all in regards to nature, it's merely a re-purposing, the consequence of destruction, disintegration of matter is heat while a lot of humans would call chopping down trees to turn into firewood, the exact opposite of destruction, "production".
Ryder Thompson
What did he mean by "anti-Fordist"?
Nathan Russell
Fuck the workers
Caleb Butler
You can't be so emotional if you want to roleplay the well-read type.
Adam Baker
He's smarter than Moldbug.
Jayden Parker
The most interesting thing about Land may be how often people who claim to disagree with him intensely essentially repeat his own writings in different words (see this thread).
Jacob Lewis
IDIOCRACY AMIRIGHT????
Evan Russell
Land boys don't read very good. He fascinates the dumb.
Carson Cooper
I have found myself either rehashing his opinions unintentionally (I have never claimed to disagree with him), or having my own work retrocausally stolen by him using time sorcery.
Ayden Torres
He influenced a variety of other philosophers, so no.
Adrian Reed
Literally who?
Angel Howard
>don't let humanities majors being incorrect abot nearly everything let you think humanities majors are incorrect about nearly everything gee...
Henry Ramirez
Speculative realists
Mason Ramirez
names
Sebastian Barnes
Are they like race realists?
Zachary Sullivan
hurrr durrr y dont u just say it plainly
as "evolution mostly never stop" there I corrected ur post 4 u
humanities majors are smart 2. dont need ur science to describe reality hurrr
Jeremiah Clark
>I went to college for the pussy but came out with existential dread and a profound hatred for academia, which led me to post over at least 3 layers of irony on a message board with other angsty millennials. Also I love hentai
Ray Brassier would be the one speculative realist who had the most direct intellectual exchange with Land. Ironically so I'd say, he apparently hates what the blog media has done to philosophy and hates (or used to hate) bloggers with a passion, as well as anyone who does not engage in the kind of philosophical discourse he deems adequate (academia of course).
